A study is reported which focused on the problem-solving strategies employed by expert electronics engineers pursuing a real-world task: integrated-circuit design. Verbal protocol data were analysed so as to reveal aspects of the organisation and sequencing of ongoing design activity. These analyses indicated that the designers were implementing a highly systematic solution-development strategy which deviated only a small degree from a normatively optimal top-down and breadth-first method. Although some of the observed deviation could be described as opportunistic in nature, much (...) of it reflected the rapid depth-first exploration of tentative solution ideas. We argue that switches from a predominantly breadth-first mode of problem solving to depth-first or opportunistic modes may be an important aspect of the expert's strategic knowledge about how to conduct the design process effectively when faced with difficulties, uncertainties, and design impasses. (shrink)

Galton and subsequent investigators find wide divergences in people's subjective reports of mental imagery. Such individual differences might be taken to explain the peculiarly irreconcilable disputes over the nature and cognitive significance of imagery which have periodically broken out among psychologists and philosophers. However, to so explain these disputes is itself to take a substantive and questionable position on the cognitive role of imagery. This article distinguishes three separable issues over which people can be "for" or "against" mental images. Conflation (...) of these issues can lead to theoretical differences being mistaken for experiential differences, even by theorists themselves. This is applied to the case of John B. Watson, who inaugurated a half-century of neglect of image psychology. Watson originally claimed to have vivid imagery; by 1913 he was denying the existence of images. This strange reversal, which made his behaviorism possible, is explicable as a "creative misconstrual" of Dunlap's "motor" theory of imagination. (shrink)

The aim of the present research was to develop a difficulty model for logical reasoning problems involving complex ordered arrays used in the Graduate Record Examination. The approach used involved breaking down the problems into their basic cognitive elements such as the complexity of the rules used, the number of mental models required to represent the problem, and question type. Weightings for these different elements were derived from two experimental studies and from the reasoning literature. Based on these weights, difficulty (...) models were developed which were then tested against new data. The models had excellent predictive validity and showed the relative influence of rule based factors and factors relating to the number of underlying models. Different difficulty models were needed for different question types, suggesting that people used a variety of approaches and, at a wider level, that both mental models and mental rules may be used in reasoning. (shrink)

Jesus Christ may be regarded as the chief spirit of agitation and innovation. He himself declared, “I come not to bring peace, but a sword.” One cannot delve seriously into the centuries of activism and scholarship against racism, Jim Crowism, and the terrorism of lynching without encountering the legacies of Timothy Thomas Fortune and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Black scholars from the 19th century to the present have been inspired by the sociological and economic works of Fortune and Wells. Scholars (...) of American philosophy, however, continue to ignore their writings, their theoretical contributions and their ethical aspirations, preferring instead the insipid declarations of white turn of the century .. (shrink)

We report the results of three experiments designed to assess the role of suppositions in human reasoning. Theories of reasoning based on formal rules propose that the ability to make suppositions is central to deductive reasoning. Our first experiment compared two types of problem that could be solved by a suppositional strategy. Our results showed no difference in difficulty between problems requiring affirmative or negative suppositions and very low logical solution rates throughout. Further analysis of the error data showed a (...) pattern of responses, which suggested that participants reason from a superficial representation of the premises in these arguments and this drives their choice of conclusion. Our second experiment employed a different set of suppositional problems but with extremely similar proofs in terms of the rules applied and number of inferential steps required. As predicted by our interpretation of reasoning strategies employed in Experiment 1, logical performance was very much higher on these problems. Our third experiment showed that problems that could be solved by constructing an initial representation of the premises were easier than problems in which this representation was not sufficient. This effect was independent of the suppositional structure of the problems. We discuss the implications of this research for theories of reasoning based on mental models and inference rules. (shrink)

In this study both adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing controls were presented with conditional reasoning problems using familiar content. In this task both valid and fallacious conditional inferences that would otherwise be drawn can be suppressed if counterexample cases are brought to mind. Such suppression occurs when additional premises are presented, whose effect is to suggest such counterexample cases. In this study we predicted and observed that this suppression effect was substantially and significantly weaker for autistic (...) participants. We take this as evidence that autistics are less contextualised in their reasoning, a finding that can be linked to research on autism on a variety of other cognitive tasks. (shrink)

In this issue we include contributions from the individuals presiding at the panel All in a Jurnal's Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose, convened at the second Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group. Sadly, the contributions of Daniel Remein, chief rogue at the Organism for Poetic Research as well as editor at Whiskey & Fox , were not able to appear in this version of the proceedings. From the program : 2ND BIENNUAL MEETING OF THE BABEL WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE “CRUISING IN (...) THE RUINS: THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINARITY IN THE POST/MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY” SEPTEMBER 21ST, 2012: SESSION 13 MCLEOD C.322, CURRY STUDENT CENTER NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MA. Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printer’s year, a night off in the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the Master Printer would make for the journeymen “a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs. Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals (from the Anglo-Fr. jurnal , "a day," from O.Fr. jornel , "day, time; day's work," hence the journalist as writer of the news of the day ) have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging. All in a Jurnal’s Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to (d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as a site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster. DISTURBING THE WEDNESDAY-ISH BUSINESS-AS-USUAL OF THE UNIVERSITY STUDIUM: A WAYZGOOSE MANIFEST Eileen A. Joy This time it is not I who seek it out . . . it is the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument . . . This element which will disturb the studium I . . . call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida What enables us to risk change is the feeling that we are understood and (therefore) accompanied. —L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Living Chaucer” Professional Challenges. Amateur Solutions. —motto of the Bruce High Quality Foundation In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education , “Ditch the Monograph,” Jennifer Howard surveys some recent experiments by university presses to cultivate and produce shorter-form e-books (i.e., Princeton Shorts and Stanford Briefs), 1 and wonders if these books might not “pull in new readers for serious scholarship,” and at a time, moreover, when “academic libraries have ever-smaller amounts of money and space to lavish on [longer] books, which often have more pages than they have readers.” 2 Paul Harvey, the new director of Stanford University Press, explains that these books will be “accessible but not simplified, and should be digestible in one or two sessions—bite-sized—and not require a month of reading.” 3 At the same time, we are witnessing the launching of new academic publishing initiatives, such as Anvil Academic, a platform for “born-digital” and “born-again-digital” “post-monograph” (non-book) research that is pinning its hopes for the future of academic publishing on networked and “digital-only” environments that would “free scholarly argument from the limitations of the printed monograph and allow authors to bring the full force of technology to the presentation of their work.” 4 It appears important to the academic collective at Anvil to continue to maintain and ensure certain protocols of peer review, but in ways that are “better suited to network environments.” Conversely, Zer0 Books (an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, Ltd.), one of the more radical and exciting academic imprints out there today, is offering shorter-form books that are very much still books in print as well as available in e-book formats. In their mission statement, Zer0 inveighs (in somewhat hysterical tones) that a “cretinous anti-intellectualism presides” over a contemporary culture, “cheerled by hacks in the pay of multinational corporations,” and thus the time is ripe for a different set of discourses—“intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist”—and while Zer0 Books, indeed, offers a particularly electric and eclectic list of reasonably-priced, shorter-form books ( Slime Dynamics , Nuclear Futurism , and Levitate the Primate are just a few samples of their bracing titles), they do not offer any of their publications in open-access form. Thus, their desire for a reinvigorated and non-bland, non-consensual sphere of public intellectual debate is still somewhat in the shadow of the multinational corporations (such as Amazon.com, to which all of their book pages link) that their mission statement scorns. 5 While watching the fat of our wayzgoose congeal in the wood-grains of the table in our communal vagabond printer’s workshop, and while bathed in the autumnal light of the raining Gutenberg-era photons to which Issac Linder has called our attention, 6 I share this admittedly woefully brief and selective overview of current trends in academic publishing initiatives simply to highlight their austerity of (or, perhaps, their overly pragmatic) imagination as well as their “heavy” managerial structures. 7 For even while I applaud the initiative of these initiatives (and I plan to support them with my voice and wallet, being a pluralist, after all), I also despair a little at the ways in which they are each, in their own way, also locked into institutional structures (whether corporate, academic, or even ideological) that determine in advance what is and isn’t (supposedly) possible and what is (supposedly) necessary now —such that, for example, the monograph is now “out” and shorter books (or serialized e-extracts from longer works) are “in,” e-texts are more desirable (and supposedly cheaper to produce and disseminate) than traditional print media, it is necessary to shift (and even dispense with) certain publishing modes to meet the demands of currently popular text-delivery technologies (such as iPads, Kindles, and smart-phones), expert and specialist peer review is still necessary for “legitimacy,” multiple layers of hierarchical and bureaucratic academic-managerial oversight still obtain while at the same time certain layers of important editorial care and curatorship drop away (due to lack of time, money, readers’ attention spans, space, etc.), the material archive (the dream of Borges’s Babelasian library or even Richard Fenyman’s 24 million library volumes etched on the head of a pin 8 ) should simply be abandoned, and so on. Being among friends in the glow of the para-academic Outside, I will dispense with the posture of academic politesse, and attempt to say what I really feel: if a radically innovative and public cultural-intellectual milieu is to flourish, and if we are to imagine and hope for future Walter Benjamins who will still attempt to cross borders with manuscripts in briefcases that are more important to them than their very own persons, 9 then what we need now is more (more papers, briefcases, Kindles, iPads, filing cabinets, shelves, teletype machines, Linux code, microchips, mimeographs, lithium batteries, candles, pens, javascripts, and so on) and not less of everything (we need print books as well as e-texts, yellow legal pads as well as the mystic writing pads of our Evernote apps, baroquely lengthy multi-volume works as well as broadsides and post-it note scholarship, close and loving and even co-dependent editorial curatorship of others’ work, and so on), and we also need the courage (or foolishness) to depart to extra-territories not bathed in the harsh fluorescent lighting of the academy “proper.” The university will continue to be an important site for keeping open the question of thought 10 and for fostering various modes of dissemination, but I also think it’s time for a subter-fugitive, vagabond, gypsy para-humanities, especially at a time when so many of us are barely hanging on to the university by the skin of our teeth (or hands or minds). 11 Let’s “get lost” now, taking the humanities with us like so many suitcases, portable libraries, and sacks of contraband diamonds. Let’s figure out inventive ways to radicalize (and thus sustain) the humanities by absconding with them to the streets, alleys, market squares, ateliers, lounges, coffee shops, bookstores, sofas, wine bars, clubs, kitchens, bedrooms, galleries, dive bars, park benches, garages, living rooms, deserted urban zones, and crumbling basements. 12 In short, let’s re-boot, let’s situate ourselves, like Diogenes on the outskirts of Athens, on the edges of our cities and towns, never losing sight of the places (and institutions) we care about, while also saying, fuck this . Let’s embrace a radical, polyglot cosmopolitanism that enunciates a “shaggy heart,” where we will have “no fixed abode” and be “nowhere a foreigner.” 13 Like practitioners of Hakim Bey’s amour fou , we should strive to be “illegal” now, “saturating” ourselves with our own aesthetic, engaging in publishing ventures that would fill themselves “to the borders” with “the trajectories of [their] own gestures,” running “on angels’ clocks,” our only goal the “ingestion of the Galaxy,” and never tilting at fates fit only for “commissars & shopkeepers.” 14 One of the things we have lost sight of in the university, and especially in our publishing practices, is the importance of play —now is the time, again cadging from Hakim Bey, to “share the mischievous destiny” of runaways, “to meet only as wild children might, locking gazes across a dinner table while adults gibber from behind their masks.” 15 Without non-utilitarian play, and without the right to flail, flounder, and fail while playing, we risk the frigid stasis of the status quo, of always being trapped in what has already been said, what has already been played out . How did we get here? How did the creative arts get so thoroughly de-cathected from the “liberal” arts? How will we give birth to heretic-misfit love-child thoughts without unbridled play? 16 So much for ontologically anarchic poetics and Bey’s wild children and crazy love: what about practicalities? Fuck practicality; this ain’t practical. For me, the most exciting publishing and dissemination ventures going are those such as continent. , Speculations , Itineration , Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies , the Organism for Poetic Research (OPR) and its publication PELT , Uitgeverij Press, eth press: postmedieval poetries, the Hollow Earth Society, the Bruce High Quality Foundation, the Confraternity of Neoflagellants, and so on 17 —journals, presses, and alternative research-cultural organizations entirely run and managed by graduate students and post-graduates (and some faculty collaborator) with no financial support to speak of and only tenuous footholds in the university (our academic precariat) and who are publishing or fostering some of the most exciting work in the humanities and arts right now, work that eschews and also troubles the waters of disciplinary genre, “review,” privilege, and status. 18 It is one of the aims of punctum books to assist these and other new (extra- but also para-institutional) publishing initiatives with various forms of regular and longer-term support (economic, editorial, aesthetic, technical, promotional, etc.), but who is paying for this? No one; at least, no one “official.” We’ve simply scraped together what we have; we’re running on the heady steam of an international all-volunteer staff and gift-share economies, also martinis, WD-40, ramen, loose change, old Talking Heads albums, matches, a glitter ball, and chewing gum. And yet, we actually believe that an open-access and print-on-demand model (in which all of our publications are both free and available for purchase) may actually lead to something like financial solvency and even jobs, but we’re not making that a condition of our future plans. We aim to grow through a vast network of talented persons (some situated in universities and cultural institutions with paying jobs, some not) dedicated to a radically independent publishing ventureshumanities that would not be beholden to any specific university or commercial academic interest, and to fostering the broadest possible range of open-access print- and e-based platforms for the sustenance of what we are calling a “whimsical para-humanities assemblage”—an assemblage, moreover, that refuses to relinquish any possible form of public-ation (the making of cultural-intellectual stealth “publics” that would seep in and out of institutional and non-institutional spaces, hopefully blurring the boundaries between “inside” and “outside”), and we are also intent on resuscitating what we are calling postmedieval and pastmodern forms of publication (from breviary and commentary and florilegium to telegram and liner notes and inter-office memo, from the Book of Hours to the cassette mixtape). The term “para-academic” was devised by Nicola Masciandaro, one of punctum’s founders, to capture the multivalent sense of something that fulfills and/or frustrates the academic from a position of intimate exteriority. Para-academia is that which is beside academia, a place whose logic encompasses many reasons and no reason at all ( para -, “alongside, beyond, altered, contrary,” from Greek para -, “beside, near, from, against, contrary to,” cognate with Sanskrit para -, “beyond”). The para is the domain of: shadow, paradigm, daemon, parasite, supplement, amateur, elite. The para-academic embodies an unofficial excess or extension of the academic that helps, threatens, supports, mocks (par-ody), perfects and/or calls it into question simply by existing next to it. 19 This accords well, I think, with some of the sentiments expressed by the editors of continent. and Speculations during an online conversation they conducted with each other on the “aesthetics of (para)academic practice,” where Michael Austin wanted to distinguish between academia and the university—“I take academia to be the culture of knowledge-communication, while the university happens to be the most notable site of such communication in present society. There is no necessary connection between the two, nor should we assume academia requires the university in order to exist”—and Paul Boshears added this important exemplification of Austin’s comments: “Both Academia and the University are imagined communities, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s phrase. However, the University is an institution that accredits, controls, and stamps the passports of those that would enter its territory. It is a striated space as opposed to Academia’s [more] fluid space.” 20 It is punctum’s aim to occupy this more fluid space but to also de-territorialize the University itself, disturbing and disrupting the Wednesday-ish, business-as-usual protocols of both the generic university studium and its individual cells and holding tanks, while also extending the very important work of the University into new and often untended spaces. Because our press was founded and is directed by premodernists (medievalists and early modernists), 21 we have some serious love of the book as a material art object and we also embrace the idea of the itinerant and also the cloistered scholar. We also can imagine that printed matter might be of some use during and after our own pre- and post-apocalyptic “Age(s) of Simplification,” while we are also intent on making use of whatever “generators of electrical essences” we can get our hands on. 22 We want it all, and we’re not inclined to ask for permission to “pretty, please” let us publish whatever it is we want to publish. In this sense, we are also impatiently presentist: we want things now, as opposed to later and if we make mistakes, if we speak (or publish) too soon, too hastily, we’ll depend on what Kathleen Fitzpatrick has termed post-publication review 23 to sort that out. What we need now is more, and not less, thought, with more words, ruly and unruly, jostling with each other across the pages and liquid retina displays of our dispersed yet still ex/intimate “commons.” This is not to say that punctum books does not care about the quality of the work it publishes (we wouldn’t publish just anything but we would certainly publish almost anything if it were interesting enough and well-written and if it appears to take seriously what we say we are looking to “pimp”: “writing as risk, adventure, a going-forth without ‘papers’ or guarantees: falling through the hole/ punctum , a falling down, free-fall. . . . quixotic, sagely mad engagements that generate and satisfy noetic-erotic need, textual thought-bodies that give pleasures only to be possessed in their presence”). Nor is this to say that we do not lavish close and creative attention upon the editing, formatting, and creative design of our publications (indeed, we want to distinguish ourselves in this manner from university and commercial academic presses that increasingly either outsource this work or defer upon authors the responsibility for editing and proofing and sometimes even formatting the layout of their own manuscripts). We are not interested in the maintenance of specific genres or disciplines (is it literary theory? poetry? philosophy? art history? memoir? sociology? cybernetics? speculative fiction? who can tell?), and thus we take seriously Derrida’s belief in a university “without condition” which has the task, especially by way of the humanities, of ensuring “the principal right to say everything, whether it be under the heading of fiction and the experimentation of knowledge, and the right to say it publicly, to publish it.” 24 We want a radical Open of thought. This is thus also about freedom, something in very short supply in the university these days, and which also has something to do with well-being, with eudaimonia , or flourishing. But we do not scorn the University-at-large, or even specific institutions (Harvard, University of Chicago, Brooklyn College, Eastern Carolina University, Berkeley, whatever), which is to note (again) that para - is also the space of the “beside” and the “near,” and more than wanting to go against or beyond the university, we seek a more supplementary (even inter- or co-dependent) relationship, 25 if also an occasionally antagonistic one. And I am not sure I would draw the same distinctions that some of the editors of continent. and Speculations might want to draw between “academia” and the “university/University.” For me, the university (similar to how both Michael and Paul described academia/Academia) is everywhere and anywhere I am at any given moment, and this also extends to all who think and write alongside me, in whatever “location,” virtual, material, or otherwise. The university is not just the buildings and lawns demarcated by specific geographical coordinates (42° 22′ 25″ N, 71° 6′ 38″ W: Harvard), but anywhere we gather to disseminate : I define this as a practice of, quite literally (following the Oxford English Dictionary ), “scattering [knowledge] abroad” and “sowing” things and “spreading [knowledge] here and there,” and “dispersing (things) so as to deposit them in all parts.” Obviously, in some cases, specific locations matter a great deal, and the very hard work of the faculty and student activists to preserve the formerly free system of public higher education in California or to maintain the disciplines of philosophy or paleography at certain universities in the UK are extremely worthwhile and important political-pedagogical causes that we should all support however we can. Wherever persons gather to pro-fess and learn, there is something of value worth protecting, while at the same time, the university proper is increasingly becoming less “liveable” for increasing numbers of teaching faculty and actual and potential learners, and we need to pay attention to that. 26 While some people fight the good fight on the inside of specific campuses and even across specific campuses, some of us will have to be willing to create and foster new domains of thinking-together (which is not the same as thinking alike). This will require risk, and a willingness to fall and tumble into holes. Speaking of holes: punctum , in the idioms of the Middle Ages and Roland Barthes (refer to my first epigraph above), is simultaneously the moment (Augustine’s punctum ; writing as always momentary ), the pricks and punctures and perforations made by awls punching holes in vellum (what makes writing, but even more so, books , possible, opening-to-writing/writing-as-opening), and also the “pointed instrument” that disturbs the studium , the sting , the speck , and the cut , into and out of which anything might fall or emerge, and by which we feel ourselves pierced (writing as shock to the system—ours, our minds, our bodies, but also systems more largely). punctum is also the cast of the dice: we’re taking chances out here. It’s a form of play, but it’s also work, perhaps the best precarious job at present in the humanities-at-large. NOTES See Princeton Shorts: Short Takes, Big Ideas , and “‘ Bite-sized’ Reading from SUP ,” Stanford University: The Dish , May 17, 2012. There is something delightfully silly in how the titles of both these book series conjure up images of men’s underwear, and it also reminds me that not many university presses are run by women. Palgrave Macmillan also recently announced a shorter-form e-book series, Palgrave Pivot . Jennifer Howard, “ Ditch the Monograph ,” The Chronicle of Higher Education , October 14, 2012. “‘Bite-sized’ Reading from SUP.” “ About Anvil Academic ,” Anvil Academic . See also Adeline Koh’s interview with the head editor of Anvil, Fred Moody: “ A Digital Solution to Academic Publishing? Introducing Anvil Academic ,” ProfHacker [ Chronicle of Higher Education weblog], September 24, 2012. I will note here that Anvil was conceptualized and is managed by a consortium of institutions (such as the Council on Library and Information Resources [CLIR], the National Institute for Technology in Library Education [NITLE], and University of Michigan Library’s MPublishing office, which is also partnered with Open Humanities Press), university scholars, and academic librarians, and is partly funded by various universities with an intensive interest in the digital humanities (such as the University of Virginia, Washington University in Saint Louis, and Stanford University, among others). Anvil appears to not have fully made up its mind whether or not it would offer services to those who might want to publish monographs (whether longer or shorter), edited collections, and journals in digital form (at times, in their various statements, they seem to be saying analog-style digital publishing is passé and not their focus, and at others, that they would welcome helping academics with digital platforms for e-versions of academic monographs, etc.). What does appear clear is that one of their chief motivating impetuses and concerns seems to be ensuring the maintenance of traditional forms of expert peer review, albeit within newly innovative digital publishing environments, and yet, at the same time, what is not clear from their website or published pieces on their project is exactly how (or what ) they plan to offer in the way of technical infrastructures, platforms, and ongoing support for those new (and increasingly networked) environments. “ About Us ,” Zer0 Books . Zer0 Books is a subsidiary of John Hunt Publishing, Ltd., a trade publisher based in the UK, known especially for the books it has published in the genres of spirituality or “New Age” studies (through its O-Books, Dodona, Mantra Books, Moon Books, Soul Rocks, and Circle Books imprints) and also in the genres of parapsychology, esoteric and mystic knowledges, holistic health, juvenile fiction, and erotica, among other subjects. While Zer0 Books is a welcome imprint in the multiverse of what might be called “radicalized” para-academic publishing, it appears to offer practically no editorial support to its authors and also offers multiple levels of “contracts,” some of which essentially amount to self-publishing. Why I bother to mention this at all will be more apparent as my little wayzgoose diatribe here gathers more steam. Let it be said, however, that I have regularly purchased titles from this imprint because they are publishing authors whose work I admire (Rob Coley and Dean Lockwood, Mark Fisher, Graham Harman, Steve Shaviro, Eugene Thacker, Ben Woodard, to name some but not all), even while I find Zer0’s editorial oversight, such as it is, appallingly uneven. In his opening remarks to the “All in a Jurnal’s Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose” session (2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, Boston, MA, 20-22 September 2012), from which my remarks here are culled and expanded upon, Isaac shared with us that, “as we proceed into the autumn with our printing projects always ahead of us and to be done, we will tonight literally be bathed not only by the artificial candlelight of our screens, but as well, in part bathed by photons raining down on us at 186,282 miles per second,” and also that “these photons that are raining down on us, will rain down on us all winter, [and] have been raining down on us all year . . . had their origin in the combustion cores at a center of 9 cyg, 572 years ago, in 1440, the year which we point to today as the common year in which, as we all know, Gutenberg is said to have brought the movable type press to the western world, inaugurating an era that stretches farther into the past and future than [Marshall] McLuhan could justify.” I would note here that I am in deep admiration of the work of Open Humanities Press , and am especially keen on their experimental writing + publishing modes as evidenced in their Living Books About Life series and Liquid Books imprint, edited by Clare Birchall and Gary Hall, as well as in some of their journals, such as Vectors . From my vantage point, OHP has been consistent in thinking “outside the box” of traditional university and commercial academic publishing and they have published some of the most radical new thinking in the humanities (albeit somewhat slowly ), but they cannot be viewed as completely “independent” of the university milieu from which all of their Editorial and Open-Access Board members, as well as the members of their Steering Group and Partners, hail. I simply seek a more radical, even anti-peer departure out of the academy for so-called “academic” publishing, while at the same time I support the idea of the university as one place among others where more radical publishing modes might be cultivated (as is the case with Anvil, OHP, Stanford Shorts, etc.), more on which below. See Richard Fenyman, “ There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom ,” Engineering and Science 23.5 (February 1960): 22–36. See Julian Yates, “ The Briefcase of Walter Benjamin/Benjamin Walter’s Briefcase: An Invent/ Story ,” rhizomes 20 (Summer 2010. Here, as always, I defer to Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). An important, more recent companion to Readings’ book is Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). I’m thinking here especially of all the post-grads with no, or contingent, jobs, the adjunct teaching staff, but also those who, for various reasons (including economic constraints), have been cut off or distanced from university life, who hope that they can play a role in intellectual “life,” but who feel increasingly unable to participate. And here I would also pause to praise para-academic educational initiatives and organizations, such as The Public School New York , The Saxifrage School , The Vancouver Institute for Social Research , The Art School in The Art School , and The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research , to name just a few, no matter how long- or short-lived, that take advantage of non-traditional, non-institutional, and anti-hierarchical spaces in which to craft new teaching and learning environments that still value embodied social-pedagogical practices. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves , trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 140. Hakim Bey, “Amour Fou,” in Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991). Bey, “Wild Children,” in T.A.Z. 16. On the importance of artful play to the humanities as well as to well-being, see L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Living Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 41–64, where she writes that, “Playing and pretending are crucial to the becomings of living creatures, to adaptation and behavioral flexibility; . . . it is transformative and transforming. We can neither thrive nor survive without it” (57). See also Aranye Fradenburg, “Frontline: The Liberal Arts of Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 39.4 (Winter 2011): 589–609. See Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism , Itineration: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Rhetoric, Media, and Culture , Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies , Organism for Poetic Research and PELT , Uitgeverij Press , eth press: postmedieval poetries , Hollow Earth Society , Bruce High Quality Foundation , and the Confraternity of Neoflagellants . Or as Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei put it during our BABEL Waygoose session, “Fuck peer review.” And as Vincent also puts it in one of the five maxims for his press, Uitgeverij (meaning simply, “Publisher”), “Only experiment can present the present. We only care about the new, whether past, present, or future. We enjoy publishing anything that’s between categories, obscure, or witnessing the edges of language. For us, all audience is potential” (see footnote 17 for Uitgeverij’s website address, where you will find all five maxims in a variety of different languages). Nicola Masciandaro, quoted in Eileen Joy, “ PARTY! Or is it a Panel Discussion on Para-Academic Publishing, or BOTH? ” punctum books [weblog], February 20, 2012. Jamie Allen et alia, “ Discussions Before an Encounter ,” continent. 2.2 (2012): 136–147. But is it important to note here that punctum books aims to publish books and other types of texts across a wide range of fields and disciplines, and our Advisory Board is made up of scholars and artists who work on diverse subjects, from political science to architecture to feminist philosophy to metal theory to new media studies to art history and beyond. References to Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1959). See Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Peer Review,” in Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 15–49. Jacques Derrida, “The Future of the Profession or the University without Condition (thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ what could take place tomorrow),” in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader , ed. Tom Cohen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 26 [24–57]. On the important possibilities of newly imagined co-dependent co-disciplinarities and radically open confraternities as one way of moving the work of the para-“University” forward, see Jonathan Hsy, “ Let’s FAIL Together, yeah yeah YEAH! ” In The Middle , October 5, 2012. As Thomas Gokey, one of Speculation ’s editors, has put it, “In the United States at least, universities have been turned into shell corporations for Sallie Mae. That might sound overly dramatic or overly cynical but I think it is the most accurate way to think about our current situation. Right now the community of questioning, learning, researching and teaching has been captured by a system whose primary function is to extract as much value out of academics as possible. The main thing that universities produce is precarious, indebted, docile workers. Universities are one of the primary tools used to produce and maintain class difference. For the most part the poorest get excluded outright, the richest pass “Go” and collect $200, everyone else gets buried in decades worth of crushing debt for the privilege of receiving an education that will be recognized. An academic is a battery that gets plugged into this dying machine” (Allen et alia, “Discussions Before an Encounter”). (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 76–81 Comments on Eugene Thacker’s “Cosmic Pessimism” Nicola Masciandaro Anything you look forward to will destroy you, as it already has. —Vernon Howard In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. The cosmicity of the sigh resides in its profound negative singularity. Moving via endless auto-releasement, it achieves the remote. “ Oltre la spera che piú larga gira / passa ’l sospiro ch’esce del mio core ” [Beyond the sphere that circles widest / penetrates (...) the sigh that issues from my heart]. 1 The axiomatic sigh of the pessimist is in a way the pure word of philosophy, a thought that thinks without you, speaks where you are not. The live pneumatic form of the soul’s eventual exit from the dead body’s mouth, the sigh restores consciousness to the funeral of being, to the passing away that is existence. Pessimism speaks in piercing aphorisms because first it sighs. “Beyond the sphere passeth the arrow of our sigh. Hafiz! Silence.” 2 … pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. To the pessimist, the ‘real’ world—the world on whose behalf we are expected to wake up in the morning—is a ceaseless index of its own unreality. The pessimist’s day is not an illumined space for the advancement of experience and action, but a permanently and inescapably reflective zone, the vast interior of a mirror where each thing is only insofar as it is, at best, a false image of itself. Within this speculative situation, inside the doubleness of the mirror, pessimism splits into two paths, false and true, one that tries to fix pessimism (establish a relation with the mirror) and decides in favor of the apparent real, and another that totally falls for pessimism (enters the mirror) and communes with the greater reality of the unreal. These two paths are distinguished by their relation to pessimism’s guilt vis-à-vis the world’s reality-project. The first form, that which remains pessimism for the world and puts on a smiling face, stays guilty to itself (i.e. unconscious) and thus turns hypocritical, becoming at once the pessimism of the commoner who really just wants things to be better for himself and the pessimism of the elite who wants to critically refashion reality in his own image. The general form of this worldly, hypocritical pessimism is the impulse to ‘make the world a better place’, which is the global mask under which the world is diurnally made worse. The second form, that which follows pessimism away from the world and ceases to put on a smiling face, refuses guiltiness as itself theessential Occidental mode of pretense and turns honest, becoming at once the intelligent pessimism required of all ordinary action and the radical pessimism necessary for self-knowledge: seeing that no one is capable of doing good. The general form of this universal, honest pessimism is the impulse not to worry, to give up and embrace dereliction, which is the only real way the world is actually improved. Where worldly pessimism is the engine productive of interminably warring secular and sacred religions (good-projects), universal pessimism strives hopelessly for the paradise of a supremely instantiated pessimus: things are getting so bad that there is no longer any time for them to get worse; things are so constantly-instantly worst that this is BEST. Cosmic pessimism is the mode of universal pessimism which can yet discourse with the world, which has not chosen silence and can spread the inconceivably BAD NEWS in an orderly form ( kosmos ) that the world can understand (if it wanted to). … the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world. That is what the world is (the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world). … a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos. Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. Pessimism’s love of fate is a blind love, a love of the blindness of being human in a cosmos conceived around the human’s eclipse, a heavy levitation in the contradictory space between the inescapability of its having been and the impossibility of its will-be. Pessimism’s song of futility is a sensible way of loving fate, with a minimum of eros, by means of a kind of matrimonial love of the fatal. As music, pessimism stays open to the irreparable and the inexorable without the binding of affirmation, in the apparent absence of the radical, infinitely surplus will that absolute amor fati seems to require. Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? “Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he achieves will scarcely be worth the trouble of his achieving it. We should aspire to the impossible, to absolute and infinite perfection [….] The apocatastasis is more than a mystical dream: it is a norm of action, it is a beacon for high deeds [….] For true charity is a species of invasion [….] It is not charity to rock and lull our fellow men to sleep in the inertia and heaviness of matter, but rather to arouse them to anguish and torment of spirit.” 3 … the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought. “The paroxysm of interior experience leads you to regions where danger is absolute, because life which self-consciously actualizes its roots in experience can only negate itself [….] There are no arguments [….] On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos [….] I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing .” 4 It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. According to the earliest account of Cecilia’s martyrdom, the beheading turns out worse. After not severing her head in three strokes, “the cruel executioner left her half dead” (seminecem eam cruentus carnifex dereliquit). 5 Cecilia’s effortlessly powerful endurance of the three strokes—a fitting icon for pessimism as an art of dereliction—demonstrates the “passivity and absence of effort [….] in which divine transcendence is dissolved.” 6 There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. Like words from a pre-waking dream. There is no reason to think that they are not. NOTES 1. Dante Alighieri. Vita Nuova . ed. and trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1995. 41:10. 2. Hafiz of Shiraz. The Divan . trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke. London: Octagon Press. 1974. 10.9. 3. Miguel de Unamuno. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations . trans. Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1972. 305-6. 4. E.M. Cioran. On the Heights of Despair . trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992. 9-10. 5. Giacomo Laderchi. S. Caeciliae Virg[inis] et Mart[yris] Acta. . . Rome. 1723. 38. 6. Georges Bataille. On Nietzsche . trans. Bruce Boone. London: Continuum. 2004. 135. See Nicola Masciandaro. “ Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia .” A Commentary on Eugene Thacker’s "Cosmic Pessimism" Gary J. Shipley Pessimism is the refusal to seek distraction, the refusal to remodel failure into a platform for further (doomed) possibilities, the refusal of comfort, the acceptance of the sickness of healthy bodies, the cup of life overflowing with cold vomit. If, as Ligotti suggests when discussing Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 1 humans prefer the anxieties of their familiar human lives to the contentment of an alien one, then the pessimist, we could argue, represents some perverted combination of the two, preferring (presuming he has a choice) the defamiliarization of human life to the contentment of its unquestioned mundanity. The quasi-religious state of mind that Wittgenstein would mention on occasion, that of “feeling absolutely safe,” 2 is a state the pessimist could only imagine being approximated by death, or perhaps some annihilative opiate-induced stupor. This Wittgensteinian commingling of certainty and faith looks every bit the futile gesture, a mere rephrasing of collapse or partial collapse. The only certainty open to the pessimist is that of the toxic formula of life itself—a formula known and lacuna-free. Certainty, far from being the gateway to deliverance, becomes the definitive impediment; and the possibility of salvation, as long as it remains, becomes crucially reliant on postulations of ignorance, epistemic gaps, a perennial incompleteness: “the perfect safety of wooed death […] the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule unknown.” 3 The height of Leibniz’s Panglossian insanity nurtured the idea that our knowing everything—via the universal calculus—could be accurately described a triumph, as opposed to a nightmare in which our every futility is laid bare. Stagnancy and boredom are perhaps two of the greatest ills of Western civilisation, and the most potent pessimism tells you that you’re stuck with both. The most we can hope for, by way of salvation, is to throw open our despair to the unknown. The fact that Schopenhauer’s pessimism stopped short of morality and allowed him to play the flute, as Nietzsche complained, highlights the predicament of a man who despite having adorned nothingness with a smiling face still found himself alive. The demand here is that it be felt: a cross-contamination of intellect and emotion. The safety net of numerous parentheses makes for a failed philosophy, rather than a philosophy of failure. Depressives make bad pessimists, because, unless they choose to die, living will always infect them with necessities of hope, forcing them to find something, anything (all the various “as ifs”) to make existence tolerable. For as Cioran observed, while “[d]epressions pay attention to life, they are the eyes of the devil, poisoned arrows which wound mortally any zest and love of life. Without them we know little, but with them, we cannot live.” 4 And even when cured of our depressions we’ll find ourselves consumed, eaten alive by the hyper-clinical (borderline autistic) mania that replaces them: a predicament captured all too clearly in the microscriptual fictions of Robert Walser, where spectral men and women stifle their depressive madness with protective comas of detail, their failed assimilations buried beneath thick crusts of remote data. Like Beckett’s Malone their stories may have ended, but cruelly their lives have not. Pessimism is an extraneous burden (a purposeless weight) that makes everything else harder to carry, while at the same time scooping it out and making it lighter. If pessimism had a sound it would be the harsh non-noise of tinnitus—the way that every person would hear themselves if they refused their distractions long enough to listen: a lungless scream from the extrasolar nothing of the self. The music of pessimism—if indeed we can imagine such a thing—is the reverberating echo of the world’s last sound, conjectured but never heard, audible only in its being listened for. The one consolation of this hollow paradox of audibility being, that “he will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that he is already nothing now.” 5 The pessimist suffers a derangement of the real, a labyrinthitis at the nucleus of his being: he’s the stumbling ghost relentlessly surprised that others can see him. If Cioran’s refusal is manifested in sleep (when even saying ‘no’ is too much of a commitment), then Pessoa’s resides in the dreams inside that sleep. Pessoa chooses to exploit the fact that he’s being “lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied” 6 by growing more voids to live him. His is a Gnostic breed of sleep, “sleeping as if the universe were a mistake,” 7 a sleep that dreams through Thacker’s cosmic pessimism (“a pessimism of the world-without-us.”, “the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time” 8 ), through the critical error of there being anything at all when there could be nothing. The metaphysical pessimist is someone who, however well life treats them, still desires to wake from it, as from the poisonous air of a bad dream. Pessimism is a paradox of age, being simultaneously young and old; its youth residing in a refusal to accept the authority of existence (its rich history, its inherent beneficence), a refusal to “get over” the horror of what it sees with its perpetually fresh eyes, and its maturity in the unceremonious disposal of the philosophical playthings (those futile architectures) of adolescence. As Thacker remarks: “Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique.” 9 A sentiment shared with Pessoa, who duly categorizes those that choose to enact this futile struggle: “The creators of metaphysical systems and of psychological explanations are still in the primary stage of suffering.” 10 If the pessimist has shared a womb with anyone, it’s with the mystic and not the philosopher. As Schopenhauer tells us: “The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. […] But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince.” 11 The crucial difference between the mystic and the pessimist is not the latter’s impassivity and defeatism, but his unwillingness/inability to contain in any way the spread of his voracious analyticity, his denial of incompleteness, his exhaustive devotion to failure. The truth of our predicament, though heard, is destined to remain unprocessed. Like the revelations of B.S. Johnson’s Haakon (“We rot and there’s nothing that can stop it / Can’t you feel the shaking horror of that?” 12 ) the pessimist’s truths are somehow too obvious to listen to, as if something inside us were saying, “Of course, but haven’t we gotten over that?” Pessimism is simple and ugly, and has no desire to make itself more complex or more attractive. The true moral pessimist knows that the Utilitarian’s accounts will always be in the red. He can see that for all his computational containments, his only honest path is a negative one, and that such a path has but one logical destination: that of wholesale human oblivion. Thacker notes how at the core of pessimism lies the notion of “the worst,” through which death is demoted by the all-pervasive suffering of a life that easily eclipses its threat. And so with doom made preferable to gloom, death begins to glint with promise, “like beauty passing through a nightmare.” 13 But even among pessimists suicide is, for the most part, thought to be an error. Schopenhauer, for instance, regarded suicide a mistake grounded in some fundamentally naïve disappointment or other. Pessoa too thought suicide an onerous escape tactic: “To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice: it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.” 14 There is a call here to be accepting of and creative with the puppetry of your being, an insistence that it’s somehow a blunder to attempt to hide in death from the horrors you find inlife. 15 Tied up with this perseverance is the slippery notion of the good death, for maybe, as Blanchot warns, suicide is rarely something we can hope to get right, for the simple reason that “you cannot make of death an object of the will.” 16 “Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete,” 17 and this is not simply because the project itself belies something yet to be disclosed, but because the project itself is a thing waiting. It waits on a cure it knows will not come, but for which it cannot do anything (as long as it continues to do anything) but wait. NOTES 1. See Thomas Ligotti. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . New York: Hippocampus Press. 2010. 91. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein. “A Lecture on Ethics.” Philosophical Review . (74) 1. 1965. 8. 3. Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire . New York: Vintage. 1989. 221. 4. E. M. Cioran. The Book of Delusions . trans. Camelia Elias. Hyperion. 5.1. (2010): 75. 5. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 609. 6. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 67. 7. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 35. 8. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 68. 9. Ibid. 73. 10. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 341. 11. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 610-11. 12. B.S Johnson. “You’re Human Like the Rest of Them.” in Jonathan Coe. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson . London: Picador. 2004. 177. 13. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 415. 14. Ibid. 199. 15. “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.” Anne Sexton. No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose . ed. Steven Gould Axelrod. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1985. 92. 16. Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature . trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1989. 105. 17. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 75. (shrink)

Stanovich & West (S&W) distinguish between evolutionary rationality and normative rationality, and System 1 and System 2 mental processes. They hold that the main function of System 2 has to do with normative and not evolutionary rationality. We ask how System 2 could then be an adaptation, especially given S&W's own work on individual differences.

Edward Aloysius Pace, philosopher and educator, by J. H. Ryan.-Neo-scholastic philosophy in American Catholic culture, by C. A. Hart.- The significance of Suarez for a revival of scholasticism, by J. F. McCormick.- The new physics and scholasticism, by F. A. Walsh.- The new humanism and standards, by L. R. Ward.- The purpose of the state, by E. F. Murphy.- The concept of beauty in St. Thomas Aquinas, by G. B. Phelan.- The knowableness of God: its relation to the theory (...) of knowledge in St. Thomas, by Matthew Schumacher.- The modern idea of God, by F. J. Sheen.- The analysis of association of its equational constants, by T. V. Moore.- Bibliography (p. 224-225) - Character and body build in children, by Sister M. Rosa McDonough. Bibliography (p. 248-249) - The moral development of children, by Sister Mary.- Medieval education (700-900) by T. J. Shahan.- The need for a Catholic philosophy of education, by George Johnson. (shrink)

Two essays relating Thomas and Whitehead have recently appeared. Coming To Be by James W. Felt, S.J., modifies Thomas by replacing his substantial form with Whitehead’s notion of subjective aim, the essencein-the-making introduced by God to guide the occasion’s act of coming into being. Felt also substitutes subjective aim for matter as the means of individuation. This is one of Whitehead’s individuating principles, although a case can be made that matter (the multiplicity of past actualities as proximate matter) (...) is another. “God and Creativity” by Stephen T. Franklin develops a reconciliation of these two ultimates by conceiving of God as the source of creativity, and seeing creativity in terms of the Thomistic esse. In my reflections on this project I explore four alternativeswith respect to the source of creativity: (a) creativity as derived from the past; (b) creativity as inherent in the present; (c) God as the source of transitional creativity (Franklin); (d) God as the source of concrescent creativity (Ford). The last two differ with respect to being’s relation to becoming. Does being undergird becoming, or does becoming bring about being, such that apart from it there would be no being? Our theory of creation depends upon this question. (shrink)

Between 1937 and 1940 the Taxonomic Principles Committee of the newly-founded Association for the Study of Systematics in Relation to General Biology (later the Systematics Association) attempted to define the relationship between evolution and taxonomy. The people who took part in the discussion were W.T. Calman, C.R.P. Diver, J.S.L. Gilmour, J.S. Huxley, W.D. Lang, J.R. Norman, R. Melville, O.W. Richards, M.A. Smith, T.A. Sprague, H. Hamshaw Thomas, W.B. Turrill, B.P. Uvarov, A.F. Watkins, E.I. White, and A.J. Wilmott. Most of (...) the botanists asserted that taxonomy was a practical matter to be kept distinct from phylogenetic speculation, and most of the zoologists insisted that taxonomists must strive to represent evolution if they wished to be scientific. The disagreement seemed to be hardening rather than approaching compromise when World War Two stopped the committee's work. (shrink)

Three clusters of philosophically significant issues arise from Frege's discussions of definitions. First, Frege criticizes the definitions of mathematicians of his day, especially those of Weierstrass and Hilbert. Second, central to Frege's philosophical discussion and technical execution of logicism is the so-called Hume's Principle, considered in The Foundations of Arithmetic . Some varieties of neo-Fregean logicism are based on taking this principle as a contextual definition of the operator 'the number of …', and criticisms of such neo-Fregean programs sometimes appeal (...) to Frege's objections to contextual definitions in later writings. Finally, a critical question about the definitions on which Frege's proofs of the laws of arithmetic depend is whether the logical structures of the definientia reflect our pre-Fregean understanding of arithmetical terms. It seems that unless they do, it is unclear how Frege's proofs demonstrate the analyticity of the arithmetic in use before logicism. Yet, especially in late writings, Frege characterizes the definitions as arbitrary stipulations of the senses or references of expressions unrelated to pre-definitional understanding. One or more of these topics may be studied in a survey course in the philosophy of mathematics or a course on Frege's philosophy. The latter two topics are obviously central in a seminar in the philosophy of mathematics in general or more specialized seminars on logicism, or on mathematical definitions and concept formation. Author Recommends: 1. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason . Trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1781, 1787], A7-10/B11-14, A151/B190. In the first Critique , Kant appears to give four distinct accounts of analytic judgments. The initial famous account explains analyticity in terms of the predicate-concept belonging to the subject-concept (A6–7/B11). In this passage, we also find an account of establishing analytic judgments on the basis of conceptual containments and the principle of non-contradiction. (The other accounts are in terms of 'identity' (A7/B1l), in terms of the explicative–ampliative contrast (A7/B11), and by reference to the notion of 'cognizability in accordance with the principle of contradiction' (A151/B190).) 2. Frege, Gottlob. The Foundations of Arithmetic . Trans. J. L. Austin. 2nd ed. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1980 [1884], especially sections 1–4, 87–91. Frege here criticizes and reformulates Kant's account of analyticity. Central to Frege's account is the provability of an analytic statement on the basis of (Frege's) logic and definitions that express analyses of (mathematical, especially arithmetical) concepts. 3. Frege, Gottlob. Review of E. G. Husserl. 'Philosophie der Arithmetik I [1894],' in Frege, Collected Papers . Ed. B. McGuinness. Trans. M. Black et al. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. 195–209. In this review, Frege responds to Husserl's charge that Frege's definitions fail to capture our intuitive pre-analytic arithmetical concepts by claiming that the adequacy of mathematical definitions is measured, not by their expressing the same senses, but merely by their having the same references, as pre-definitional vocabulary. It follows not only that Husserl's criticism is unfounded, but also that there can be alternative, equally legitimate, definitions of mathematical terms. 4. Frege, 'Logic in Mathematics,' in Frege, Posthumous Writings . Trans. P. Long and R. White. Oxford: Blackwell, 1979 [1914]. 203–50. These are a set of lecture notes including, among other things, an account of proper definitions as mere abbreviation of complex signs by simple ones, in contrast to definitions which purport to express the analyses of existing concepts. Frege here claims that if there is any doubt whether a definition purporting to express an analysis succeeds in capturing the senses of the pre-definitional expressions, then the definition fails as an analysis, and should be regarded as the introduction of an entirely new expression abbreviating the definiens . 5. Picardi, Eva. 'Frege on Definition and Logical Proof,' Temi e Prospettive della Logica e della Filosofia della Scienza Contemporanee . i vol. Eds. C. Cellucci and G. Sambin. Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 1988. 227–30. Picardi sets out forcefully the view that unless Frege's definitions capture the meanings of existing arithmetical terms, his logicism cannot have the epistemological significance he takes it to have. 6. Dummett, Michael. 'Frege and the Paradox of Analysis,' in Dummett, Frege and other Philosophers . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. 17–52. Dummett agrees with Picardi's view and analyzes the philosophical pressures that led Frege to the account of definition in 'Logic in Mathematics.' Especially significant is Dummett's claim of the centrality of the transparency of sense – that if one grasps the senses of any two expressions, one must know whether they have the same sense – in Frege's account. 7. Benacerraf, Paul. 'Frege: The Last Logicist,' Midwest Studies in Philosophy . vol. 6. Eds. P. French, T. Uehling, and H. Wettstein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981. 17–35. Frege's aims, on Benacerraf's reading, are primarily mathematical. Frege was interested in traditional philosophical issues such as the analyticity of arithmetic only to the extent that they can be exploited for the mathematical goal of proving previously unproven arithmetical statements. Hence, Frege never had any serious interest in or need for showing that his definitions of arithmetical terms reflect existing arithmetical conceptions. 8. Weiner, Joan. 'The Philosopher Behind the Last Logicist,' in Frege: Tradition and Influence . Ed. C. Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. 57–79. Weiner argues that on Frege's view, prior to his definitions of arithmetical terms the references of such expressions are in fact not known by those who use arithmetical vocabulary. Thus, in Foundations , Frege operated with a 'hidden agenda' (263) namely, replacing existing arithmetic with a new science based on stipulative definitions that assign new senses to key arithmetical terms. 9. Tappenden, Jamie. 'Extending Knowledge and 'Fruitful Concepts': Fregean Themes in the Foundations of Mathematics.' Noûs 29 (1995): 427–67. Tappenden argues that Frege takes his crucial innovation over previous practices and accounts of mathematical concept formation to be the role of quantificational structure made possible by his logical discoveries. 10. Horty, John. Frege on Definitions: A Case Study of Semantic Content . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. A useful interpretation of Frege's views of definition, together with suggestive extensions for resolving the issues framing Frege's views. 11. Shieh, Sanford. 'Frege on Definitions,' Philosophy Compass 3/5 (2008): 992–1012. A more detailed account of Frege's views on definition and the philosophical issues they raise, surveying and discussing critically the main substantive and interpretive issues. Online Materials On Frege http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frege/ On the Paradox of Analysis http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/ Sample Syllabus The following is a 3-week module that can be incorporated into fairly focused historically oriented graduate-level seminars on logicism or on the paradox of analysis. It is also possible to compress the material into 2 weeks in an undergraduate or graduate class Frege's thought in general. Week I: Background, Kant on Analyticity; Definition in Foundations , Review of Husserl, and 'Logic in Mathematics' Readings Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason , A7–10/B11–14. Frege, Gottlob. The Foundations of Arithmetic , sections 1–4, 87–91. Frege, Gottlob. Review of E. G. Husserl, Philosophie der Arithmetik I. Frege, Gottlob. 'Logic in Mathematics.' Optional Proops, Ian. 'Kant's Conception of Analytic Judgment,' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXX, 3 (2005): 588–612. Week II: The Supposed Paradox of Analysis, Picardi and Dummett; Bypassing Traditional Epistemological Issues About Mathematics, Benacerraf Readings Picardi, Eva. 'Frege on Definition and Logical Proof.' Dummett, Michael. 'Frege and the Paradox of Analysis.' Benacerraf, Paul. 'Frege: The Last Logicist.' Optional Tappenden, Jamie. 'Extending Knowledge and 'Fruitful Concepts': Fregean Themes in the Foundations of Mathematics.' Week III: Weiner's Hidden Agenda Interpretation Readings Weiner, Joan. 'The Philosopher Behind the Last Logicist.' Optional Weiner, Joan. Frege in Perspective . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Focus Questions 1. To what extent is Frege's account of analyticity in Foundations a rejection, and to what extent an updating, of Kant's view of analyticity? 2. According to Picardi it 'would be incomprehensible' how Frege's proofs tells us anything about the arithmetic we already have unless his 'definitions [are] somehow responsible to the meaning of [arithmetical] sentences as these are understood' (228). Why does she hold this? Why does Dummett agree with her? Do you think Frege's logicism needs to address this worry? 3. What are the major differences and continuities in Frege's discussions of definition in mathematics in Foundations , the review of Husserl and 'Logic in Mathematics'? 4. Frege writes that definitions must prove their worth by being fruitful. He also says that nothing can be proven using a proper definition that cannot be proven without it. Are these claims consistent? Why or why not? 5. Weiner held that in Foundations Frege had 'hidden agenda.' What, according to her, is this agenda? How does this fit with Frege's later views of definition? 6. What are Frege's main complaints about Weierstrass's definitions in 'Logic in Mathematics'? Are these criticisms consistent with Frege's account of 'definition proper' in the same text? Seminar/Project Ideas What, if anything, is the relation between Frege's critique of Hilbert's use of definitions and Frege's later views of definitions? (shrink)

Using covariant derivatives and the operator definitions of quantum mechanics, gauge invariant Proca and Lehnert equations are derived and the Lorenz condition is eliminated in U(1) invariant electrodynamics. It is shown that the structure of the gauge invariant Lehnert equation is the same in an O(3) invariant theory of electrodynamics.